As SSDs are getting more and more beneficial, we bought 4 Kingston 300v SSD with 480GB of space and installed them in the OEM cases of the HP disks. Yes, this works!

For our tests this hardware is more than enough.

First of all I googled around to see if there was already someone who tried to install ESXi 6.0 on an old DL380 G5 as it isn’t a supported hardware. I’ve found this article from a guy that was having problems with the HP custom iso installing it on a G5 server:

So I decided to have a try with the original ISO. After booting the Image I received an error message saying that I’m using unsupported hardware. Thank’s for the information but I know this already You can accept the information an run-through.

After the installation completed, I connected to the ESXi server with the VIClient. Everything looked well with the exception of the hardware. There was no hardware listed.

This is because the HP drivers are not integrated into the image. So I downloaded the needed VIBs from the HP VIB repository and installed them (the text in the brackets is not part of the command). For those who don’t know what a VIB is, have a look on this article:

Retry now to run the enter maintenance mode command and check the state with this command:

1-vim-cmd /hostsvc/hostsummary | grep inMaintenanceMode

The output should look similar to this:

1-inMaintenanceMode = <strong>true</strong>,

As you can see, the ESX server is now in maintenance mode. So i could begin with the installation of the VIBs. For this I used the esxcli “software vib install”. It is important that you write the full path to the VIB file. Otherwise the command ends with an error:

1-Installation Result2-Message: The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective.3-Reboot Required: true6-VIBs Installed: Hewlett-Packard_bootbank_hpnmi_600.2.3.14-21592037-VIBs Removed:8-VIBs Skipped:

As you can see in the message, the system requires a reboot after the installation. So we can now reboot the system with the reboot command.